Subject: Re: Food Customs and Ritu

From: [email-masked] (L.A.Z. Smith)
Date: 15 Dec 93 09:19:57 GMT

On timing of the salad...

I've always understood that salad first was a California custom, and salad
afterward was European.  Like most things begun in California, salad first
has spread throughout the US, though most Midwesterners I know still serve
salad with the main course when dining at home.

On the other hand, when I traveled in Holland, every restaurant meal had a
composed salad served with the main course (and also two kinds of fried
potatoes).  In Australia, they seem to serve tossed salads with the main
course.

Yeats wrote, in tones of severe disapproval:

It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the horn of plenty is undone.

Leah Smith		[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Phyllis Gilmore)
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 93 15:31:11 GMT

In Article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (L.A.Z. Smith) wrote:
>afterward was European.  

Yeah, yeah.  Blame it on California.  Everyone blames everything on us.  

My Dad's parents came from Pennsylvania; their parents came from Northern
Ireland and Wales in this century.  My mothers family has been hanging 
around the midwest since the first settlers crossed the hills to the east.
They all are in the "salad with" group for normal family meals.  The only
time I've eaten anything remotely resembling "salad" in Paris, it was with--
but then, that was at a buffet.

Maybe an additional level of specification is in order:  regular family
meals versus special-occasion meals versus cheap restraunts versus formal
restraunts???

Phyllis

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From: [email-masked] (david.j.daulton)
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1993 17:08:26 GMT

>On timing of the salad...

I heard/read somewhere that salad last was traditional, as in "soup to salad",
but restaurants start with salad because it is quicker prepared.

Dave Daulton, Columbus, Ohio

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From: [email-masked] (Jane Beckman)
Date: 21 Dec 93 00:22:53 GMT

>I've always understood that salad first was a California custom, and salad

Most of the later European custom  (18th century and later) 
seems to place salad at about the midpoint of the meal.  Salad
first, I have seen documented for 1830's in California, but
that seems to be rather late for development.  The salad first
is probably mediterranian, as an antipasta sort of course.

--
  Jilara   [[email-masked]]
That's how freedom will end: not with a bang, but with a rustle of file
folders.  If you love any of your rights, defend all of them!
-Joe Chew, on the net

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From: [email-masked] (beth diane garfinkel)
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1993 03:12:48 GMT

I once went to a historic park that was a running 19th-century iron
forge. Part of it was an authentic-style (or so they'd like visitors to
think) household; one of the things they told us was that workers at the
forge liked to eat salad first because the vinegar used in salad
dressing cut the taste of the coal smoke from the forge.

								Beth
-- 
"Under the green wood tree/Who loves to lie with me/And tune his merry
note/Unto the sweet bird's throat/Come hither, come hither, come hither/
Here he shall see/No enemy/But winter and rough weather."
						--William Shakespeare